Autor: Frank Kirchner

Intelligent and autonomous robots are an essential part of the development of industry 4.0 solutions. They will act as a direct interaction partner to humans together in teams and perform works that are much more complex than today‘s typical tasks for industrial robots. Such robots need to deal with a confusing and unpredictable environment and have to react to unforeseeable events. In order to capture this environment and to plan actions, real-time processing of complex sensor information is necessary. Conventional computer architectures appear to be insufficient for such kind of tasks. To solve this problem, hardware accelerators for robotics based on the dataflow paradigm are developed at the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.

Today sensors and actuators gain increased importance in industrial production processes. Traditionally centralized processing architectures are used for sensor data processing and actuator control. Increasing sensor and actuator densities require new decentralized and distributed processing methods and architectures. Artificial Intelligence, part of computer science, can contribute to robustness and autonomy aspects concerning data processing and distribution.

Advancements in the automation of technical systems enable the simultaneous accomplishment of multiple complex functions. Through further integration of information and communication technologies, systems will be able to communicate among each other and autonomously adapt their behaviour to changes in the environment. For the realisation of logistic functions, autonomous robots are promising systems. For the development and prototypal testing of such robots the automobile terminal was chosen due to its specific attributes and challenges. This article introduces an approach for the combination of security services and continuous inventory by means of autonomous and cooperating robots. To enhance the efficiency of automobile terminals, innovative information and communication technologies are implemented and robust autonomous robots developed.